“On the Bridge between Wisdom and Folly”
Looking back on his move to Boston, John Quincy recalled, “though I cannot say I was friendless . . . I was without support of any kind. I may say I was a stranger in that city, although almost a native of that spot.” And he had struggled. For the first year he could hardly name any law practice he had at all. In fact, “Very busy with nothing to do,” he “wasted time at court,” took walks and dined with friends and family, and seemed cheered only on the November day he “wrote all day and evening. Tolerably satisfied.”1
On April 1, 1791, he decided once more that he would keep a journal of his “transactions.” He often found himself wishing to “fix the fleeting reflection which originates in some transient occurrence”; he had decided to attempt again “an undertaking which indolence had so often rendered abortive.”2
Under the pseudonym Publicola, Roman friend of the people, John Quincy would publish 11 impassioned essays in Boston’s Columbian Centinel from June 8 to July 27, 1791, in response to which his “steadfast friend and earnest well-wisher,” James Bridge, supposed that “Dear Publicola” must have struggled with his conscience before he “clasped his sickle to reap in the field of politics.”3
In truth, Publicola’s motivation was far more complex, fired not only by ideological and philosophical differences with Thomas Paine, but more acutely by a heartbreaking sense that his father had been betrayed by Thomas Jefferson, the family friend whom he had once loved to be with because he was “a man of great judgment.”4
Thoughts of Jefferson evoked his youth in Paris where he had learned to speak French like a native and lived gratefully and uniquely with his parents and sister in their all too fleeting reunion. For him, France was a keepsake of fond memories. At present, with the future of the French government at stake, he feared to think of the fate of its people.
The unraveling of France’s old regime had begun more or less officially in May 1789 when the States General, comprising Three Estates (the First, the clergy; Second, the nobility; Third, the so-called commoners) had dissolved into a National Assembly. On July 14 a mob stormed the Bastille; the night of August 4 saw la Grande Peur, the peasant uprising that signaled the end of feudalism; three weeks later, on August 26, the National Assembly published the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The influence of the United States was unmistakable.
France in tumultuous revolt launched a fury of responses. Word had traveled swiftly across the English Channel (and on to Boston and Philadelphia) to be exalted with supreme enthusiasm by the eminent, 68-year-old British philosopher, preacher, Protestant dissenter, pamphleteer and advocate for American independence, Richard Price, minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church. In his “Discourse on the Love of Our Country,” Price was thankful, he said, after sharing in the benefits of one revolution, that of 1688 (England’s Glorious Revolution); he now thought he saw the love for liberty catching and spreading, and the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience.5
Price’s discourse, read in London just two months later, in January 1790, “set in motion the avalanche of [the Irish born, Protestant statesman Edmund] Burke’s eloquence against the Revolution.” As “an observer of the wonderful spectacle exhibited in a neighboring and rival country, that is England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for liberty and not knowing whether to blame or to applaud,” Burke found the spirit impossible not to admire. But the old Parisian ferocity that had broken out was shocking and insupportable.6
Burke wanted more from the “dissenting divine,” as he called Price, something deeper than “the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface.” He looked on that sermon as a “sort of a porridge of various public opinions and reflections”—but the revolution in France was the grand ingredient in the cauldron—as the “public declaration of a man much connected with literary caballers, and intriguing philosophers, with political theologians and theological politicians, both at home and abroad.” He was set up as a sort of oracle because, Burke concluded, he naturally “chants his prophetic song in exact unison with their designs.”7
Burke’s stormy rebuttal of Price, Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in November 1790, was printed in Philadelphia the following March. Abigail was the first to mention it; her response was judicious though shaded. She had read Burke’s letter and though she thought “he paints high, yet strip it of all its ornament and coloring, it will remain an awful picture of liberty abused, authority despised, property plundered, government annihilated, religion banished, murder, rapine and desolation scourging the land.”8
As for Richard Price, her “worthy and venerable divine” so admired when she had lived in London, she was sorry he should expose himself at this late period of his life to so severe a censure. Though she loved and venerated his character, she did “think his zeal a mistaken one.”9
John Quincy had obviously read Burke, too. He did not have the leisure to pursue his inclinations, he thought, that is to venture on some speculations in the newspapers because, quoting Burke on Ecclesiastes, “He that hath little business shall become wise.” Personalizing this advice, it was “at least incumbent upon him who is in that predicament, to endeavor to obtain wisdom.”10
And he had kept his word. He had remained essentially on the sidelines on the issue of the French Revolution, at least for one month, until The Rights of Man, Part I, the work of Thomas Paine, surfaced in Philadelphia in May. In a kind of rebuttal of a rebuttal, Paine defended Price against Burke’s attack.
Paine was one of the most polarizing figures in all of early America. Author of The Common Man, variously regarded as “pamphleteer laureate” of America, propagandist, opportunist, meddler and gadfly, Paine had been introduced to the colonies as an “ingenious worthy young man” by Benjamin Franklin. In John Adams’s contrary opinion, Paine was a “Star of Disaster.” In the preface to his current work, the British publication of The Rights of Man, Paine felt compelled to answer Burke because of the latter’s thundering attack and “outrageous abuse on the French Revolution” and the principles of liberty: “Notwithstanding Mr. Burke’s horrid paintings, when the French Revolution is compared with revolutions of other countries, the astonishment will cease when we reflect that principles, and not persons, were the meditated objects of destruction.”11
As for the English constitution so powerfully defended by Burke and “the bulwark of reactionary government,” Paine wrote, there “never did, there never will, and there never can, exist a Parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, controlling posterity to the end of time, or commanding for ever how the world shall be governed or who shall govern it.” Further, all such clauses, acts or declarations by which the makers of them attempted to do what they had neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, were in themselves “null and void.” Moreover, “the vanity and presumption of government beyond the grave was,” he continued, “the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies.”12
To John Quincy, Paine’s wishful annihilation of the tenets of the English Parliament of 1688, and of the English constitution that his father believed to be the only workable form of government, was disturbing in itself. But the endorsement of Paine’s work by the trusted, beloved friend of his youth was intolerable. Now John Quincy read to his utter dismay that Thomas Jefferson was “extremely pleased to find it [Rights of Man] will be reprinted, and that something is at length to be publicly said against the political heresies which have sprung up among us. I have no doubt our citizens will rally a second time round the standard Common Sense.”13
John Quincy all too clearly understood, as did his parents, Jefferson’s reference to “heresies.” These were the serialized installments of John Adams’s Discourses on Davila, his seeming defense of the monarchical rule of Great Britain, which Paine construed to be a shameless endorsement of the tyranny and arrogance inextricably linked with a monarchy. Immediately on publication of the first installment of the Discourses, John Adams knew he was in trouble and was made to feel foolish, pompous, almost treasonous in his advocacy of Great Britain’s government. Popular support of France, enhanced by both Jefferson’s and Paine’s encouraging rhetoric, pointedly marked Adams’s published articles as an obvious target for misinterpretation. John defended himself to his friend Dr. Benjamin Rush, on April 18, 1790: “I am a mortal and irreconcilable enemy to monarchy. I am no friend to hereditary limited monarchy in America.” As he had written in January 1776 when he had recommended a legislature in three independent branches, he was, he assured Rush, still attached to the same theory.14
John Adams felt quite alone, though he had “acted in public with immense multitudes,” he had “few friends,” and those few were “certainly not interested ones.”15
He was mistaken. The writer who called himself “Publicola,” who attacked Jefferson’s inscription in Paine’s Rights of Man with caustic precision, was not only his friend but also his son. With shrewd deliberation, Publicola pleaded his case. The late revolution in France, an event “so astonishing and unexpected in its nature, and so important in its consequences,” had arrested the peculiar attention of the whole civilized world, including philosophers and politicians who speculated on what foundation this newly acquired liberty would be rooted. Two among these were Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine, whose separate publications, “founded upon very different principles,” were received with “the greatest avidity.”16
At no point in his implacable denunciation did Publicola mention Jefferson by name. But there was no mistake about the identity of the “very respectable gentleman” to whom Publicola addressed himself: “I confess, Sir, I am somewhat at a loss to determine what this very respectable gentleman means by political heresies. Does he consider this pamphlet of Mr. Paine’s as the canonical book of political scripture? As containing the true doctrine of popular infallibility, from which it would be heretical to depart in one single point? . . . [does it] compel all countrymen to cry out, ‘There is but one Goddess of Liberty and Common Sense is her prophet?’”17
Initially Jefferson was convinced that the author of the Davila discourses and Publicola were one and the same—none other than John Adams, as he wrote to James Madison on June 28, 1791. But in mid-July, Madison supposed, “If young Adams be capable of giving the dress in which Publicola presents himself, it is very probable he may have been made the editor of his father’s doctrines. . . . There is more of method also in the arguments, and much less of clumsiness and heaviness in the style, than characterize his father’s writings.”18
Madison’s conclusions were confirmed in John Quincy’s last essay, July 27, in the Columbian Centinel:
The papers under the signature of Publicola have called forth a torrent of abuse, not upon their real author nor upon the sentiments they express, but upon a supposed author, and supposed sentiments. With respect to the author, not one of the conjectures that have appeared in the public prints has been well grounded. The Vice-President neither wrote nor corrected them.
With respect to the sentiments, to those who have read the pieces with attention, it is needless to say that they are simply an examination of certain principles and arguments contained in a late pamphlet of Mr. Paine’s, which are supposed to be directly opposite to principles acknowledged by the constitutions of our country. And the author challenges all the writers who have appeared in support of Mr. Paine’s infallibility to produce a single passage to these publications which has the most distant tendency to recommend either a monarchy or an aristocracy to the citizens of those States.19
Publicola’s essays were reprinted in New York and Philadelphia and eventually London, Edinburgh and Dublin. They added “fuel to the funeral pile of Liberty” in Jefferson’s opinion. On the other hand, the Adamses thought Jefferson’s support of Paine favored “a mere popular tyranny,” bordering too closely on social disintegration. Crossroads, though signs were not clear, had been reached; “general types” known as conservatives and democrats from hereon would marshal the people of the United States in opposition to each other, “when not affected by disturbing influences from without.” But this was hindsight on John Quincy’s part. For the moment, raw personal wounds required immediate attention.20
Jefferson took up his pen a dozen times, and laid it down as many again, “suspended between opposing considerations.” He was determined finally, on July 17, 1791, to write from a conviction that “truth, between candid minds,” could never do harm. And also that the “friendship and confidence” that had so long existed between them required his explanation.21
To begin with, he told John Adams, it was James Madison who had lent him Paine’s pamphlet. When he had finished reading it, he was to send it to a Mr. Jonathan B. Smith, whose brother meant to reprint it. Because he wanted “to take off a little of the dryness of the note,” he thought it proper, as a stranger, to add a few comments, and he had done just that. He was glad the pamphlet was to be reprinted, that something was to be publicly said against the political heresies which had sprung up among them. But subsequently, he had been “thunderstruck” on seeing his note reprinted at the beginning of the pamphlet and hoped it would not attract notice. Unfortunately, it had been reprinted not only in New York and Philadelphia, but also London, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dublin and Dordrecht.22
In conclusion, Jefferson wrote, “That you and I differ in our ideas of the best form of government is well known to us both; but we have differed as friends should do, respecting the purity of each other’s motives, and confining our differences of opinion to private conversations.”23
Jefferson, who had pledged privacy “in the presence of the almighty,” did not keep his word. On May 8, 1791, he had written to George Washington and mentioned Adams’s “apostasy to hereditary monarchy and ability.” On May 9, 1791, he had confided to James Madison that he had Adams in mind when he mentioned “political heresies.” As late as July 3, to his son-in-law, Thomas Mann Randolph Jr., he had elaborated on the problem of his so-called note of endorsement and how he “knew immediately that it would give displeasure to some gentlemen, fast by the chair of government, who were in sentiment with Burke, and as much opposed to the sentiments of Paine.”24
John Adams answered Jefferson at great length on July 29, 1791. Regarding his prefatory note to the Philadelphia edition of Paine’s pamphlet, the person who had committed the breach of his confidence by making it public, “whatever were his intentions,” had sown the seeds of more evils than he could ever atone for. Thanks to the pamphlet and Jefferson’s renown, his own writings were deliberately misinterpreted. Thanks to Jefferson, he was held up to the ridicule of the world for his “meanness,” for wishing to subjugate the people to a few nobles, for favoring the introduction of hereditary monarchy and aristocracy in America and, ultimately, suffering “as fiery an ordeal as I did, when I was suspected of a blasphemous doubt of Tom Paine’s infallibility.”25
There was no question in John’s mind that Jefferson’s writings had cost him readers and believers. An agonizing sense of failed justice permeated a ringing passage of his letter to Jefferson: “Of the few who have taken the pains to read them, some have misunderstood them and others have willfully misrepresented them, and these misunderstandings and misrepresentations have been made the pretense for overwhelming me with floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous abuse, unexampled in the history of this country.”26
It had been Jefferson’s hope to prove himself as innocent “in effect” as he was in intention, and that their friendship would never be “suffered to be committed,” whatever use others might think proper to make of their names. At the end of his July 17 letter, he had wished John to present “Mrs. Adams with all the affections I feel for her,” a gesture unwelcomed by Abigail. Her silent condemnation would be suspended only momentarily by her note of condolence in response to the tragic death of his daughter Mary, known as Polly, 13 years later, long after she had stopped believing that there could be “any event in this life which could call forth feelings of mutual sympathy” between herself and Jefferson.27
John Quincy, though he maintained a remarkable objectivity in regard to his political policies, never again trusted Jefferson personally. After reading about 50 pages of the first volume of Jefferson’s memoirs, he concluded that Jefferson “tells nothing but what redounds to his own credit. He is like the French lady who told her sister she did not know how it happened, ‘mais il n’y a que moi au monde qui a toujours raison.’ Jefferson, by his own narrative, is always in the right.” Probably, John Quincy assumed, it was Jefferson’s college professor William Small who “initiated him in the mysteries of free-thinking and irreligion, which did fix the destinies of his life. Loose morals necessarily followed. If not an absolute atheist, he had no belief in a future existence.”28
That fall of 1791, troubled for some time about his weak eyesight, almost blind he claimed at one point, John Quincy was frequently unwell. His worrisome notation of October 20—“Constant at Court. Evening at my office. Dr. Swett”—suggests that his visit to the physician for medical attention was the result of being under pressure. A week later, rather shyly, he acknowledged to his brother Thomas “my confidence in myself growing much stronger,” and that he had acquitted himself at the Suffolk County Court of Common Pleas “more to my satisfaction than I had ever done before.”29
Three months later, he would write Thomas again, asking if his brother might have observed in the Columbian Centinel of January 14 that a “committee of 21 inhabitants of this town was chosen in town-meeting to report to the town what measures it might take to reform the present state of the police”; and “you may have noticed that my name was among those of several of the most respectable characters in this town upon that committee.”30
The issue, ultimately voted down, was a request of certain citizens for a city charter. His nomination by Dr. Charles Jarvis (“the first public notice ever shown me”) had been a surprise, but the physician’s speech more so: “that this country was under great obligations to my father, and he thought it very proper that some notice should be taken of his son; that he observed I generally attended the town-meetings, and appeared to interest myself in the affairs of the town; that I was a ‘sensible young man’ (excuse the vanity of the relation) and he wished to hear my sentiments on this subject.”31
And yet, proud as he was of being asked to serve on the committee, he had declined the assignment. Though the occasion, he recognized, offered a very good opportunity, possibly even the opening to a political career, he had chosen to postpone to some future period his appearance as a speaker in town-meeting—the principal reason being “a want of confidence in myself, which operated most forcibly upon me.” He hoped, however, “the time will come, when I shall not be so much oppressed by my diffidence.”32
In April 1792, while John Quincy had been soberly reading Cicero’s orations, Spinoza for law and Shakespeare transiently, and amusing himself with his flute, he reminded himself that “more than 11 months have elapsed since I put pen to this paper,” that is, to his diary. But then, in self-defense of his truancy, he questioned whether “events perfectly trivial, or barely rising beyond the level of insipidity . . . painful occurrences and mortifying reflections”—in other words, his dull and dreary life—were worthy of record, of “stability and duration.”33
No matter how much he hoped to rationalize his position, he remained inconsolable. On Tuesday, April 17, he wrote that “The Court of Common Pleas sits this day. I entered about half a dozen actions. More than I have ever done hither-to, but still very small. My business has an aspect a little more favorable than it has had but still remains for me abundant occasion for anxiety.”34
Some days he tried to divide his time, reserving the latter part of the day for what he called “mental amusement for the investigation of those parts of science, which have no other relation to the law than the universal chain.” Other times, he was determined to make himself a complete master at least of all the Latin classics. He was, for example, much pleased with reading Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism.35
Then again, at his office in the forenoon, when he solemnly vouched that he made inquiries into the laws relative to executors and administrators, he broke off, as though to plead to an unknown genie for help to fulfill his lofty goals and earnest needs, or possibly just to save him from miserable boredom. “Support me,” he wrote, “ye powers of patience, through these sandy deserts of legal study, from whence I am to pick up a scanty subsistence by forcing an unnatural cultivation.”36
Yet by May 16, he was still dissatisfied with the manner in which he employed his time, calculated as it was to keep him “forever fixed in that state of useless and disgraceful insignificancy” which had been his for some years past. Close to age 25, a time when many of his contemporaries had made a reputation, he still found himself “as obscure as unknown to the world, as the most indolent or the most stupid of human beings. In the walks of life I have done nothing.”37
For a time, his intense self-examinations were suspended despite his promised commitment. Still, he sustained, and would continue to do so faithfully, his line-a-day pages, a kind of alternate, brief and frankly worded memoir, a daily calendar of his aches and pains, sorrows, private failings and public ventures. He suffered a toothache, sleepless nights, low spirits, poor vision, rheumatism and “melancholy reflections.” He played chess, whist, the flute, learned shorthand, and despaired that smallpox had begun to ravage friends and that he too was affected by pocks on his face.38
About the evening supper parties, assemblies and dances, he listed the usual complaints of “conversation sentimental & insipid” or dull, or being too large, or when he danced with the Misses Pierce, Shattuck and Breck—“be it forgotten”—or that he found the telling of fortunes a silly amusement, or that he was ill dressed on another occasion, in complete dishabille in large and splendid company yet “I cannot help it.”39
After, as he termed it, a “somewhat busy” day, both afternoons and evenings, he frequently walked in the mall, a promenade that wound its way through the breadth of Beacon Hill, shaded with double rows of lime, elm and poplar trees. The craggy western and southern slopes gave way to meadow and pastureland; the north slope ended at water’s edge and a thriving seaport of wharves, rope walks and sailor’s lodgings sometimes disapprovingly known as “Mount Whoredom.”40
John Quincy took walks alone and, more usually, with friends. But there are increasing hints now of hesitant but potentially embarrassing encounters with women who frequented a certain area of the mall. “I am,” he wrote on April 26, 1793, “on the bridge between wisdom and folly.” Walking in the mall the evening of September 3 he was “fortunately unsuccessful”; of other evenings, “not so wise as sometimes”; “no harm”; “a foolish but fortunate walk.” By New Year’s Eve he was “determined upon a course of more discretion”: his friends drank champagne with him at his own house.41
Fortunately for his parents, their son guarded his most feverish private concerns between the covers of his diary. Outwardly, though somewhat obsessed about his finances (and understandably so), to their knowledge he was a hard-working, conscientious, brilliant and future star of state, country and the world. John Quincy hoped that his father would not consider it as trifling with his time to spend hours on translations of French political writings and on the defense of theater in Boston. Louis de Rousselet, a Catholic priest, editor of The Courier Politique de l’Universe, which published news of the French Revolution, had asked him to work on some of the English translations. Resolving the legal problems of the theater would be a far greater challenge.
On December 7, Boston’s American Apollo carried the final advertisement for “a comic lecture,” a performance of David Garrick’s The Lying Valet, and “a musical lecture,” The Padlock, by David Bickerstaffe. The next day, actor Joseph Harper advertised in the Columbian Centinel that while he lamented the necessity he was under, “thus early to leave this hospitable capital,” he was “grateful to the people of Boston for their many favors.” Actually, Harper had departed under arrest and the theater was shut down. A dismayed John Quincy reported to his father that after three months of virulent argument to legalize theater in Boston, “The Governor has at length prevailed in routing the players.”42
Cast-iron opposition to theater in Boston dated back to 1750 when the General Court had passed “An Act to Prevent Stage-Plays, and Other Theatrical Entertainments,” which imposed five-pound fines on anyone running, acting in or attending a theatrical production. And opposition persisted in 1767 because “a majority of the members of the Legislature believed that such exhibitions had a tendency to corrupt the morals of the people and were inconsistent with the sober deportment which Christians ought to maintain.”43
Twenty-five years later, in January 1792, Boston was no more hospitable. When the Massachusetts Legislature declared, in rejecting the most recent challenge, “that it was not expedient to repeal the law,” it was clear that if Boston was to have a theater, it must be in defiance of the authorities. As a result, the New Exhibition Room, a theater in all but name, built in a converted stable in the plank-floored, marshy passage called Board Alley (today’s Hawley Street), opened to the public on August 10, 1792.44
Still, the pro-theater group persisted in pressing its case to no avail. Rival and wrathful factions had argued until Wednesday, December 5, when Governor John Hancock ordered Attorney General James Sullivan to prosecute immediately the violators of the law. By evening, Sheriff Jeremiah Allen had arrested Joseph Harper mid-performance and demanded, under threat of punishment, the instant dispersal of the rest of the company.
Chaos ensued. An infuriated audience, resenting the interruption of the performance, tore down the state’s coat of arms and trampled a portrait of Governor Hancock. Two nights later, Boston’s town clerk and seasoned justice of the peace, William Cooper, read the Massachusetts Riot Act of 1786 to restrain an opposition contingent from destroying the theater. In the end, the company decided that obedience to the law was safest, and Harper was released when Justices Benjamin Greenleaf and Samuel Barrett of the Court of Common Pleas declared the warrant illegal. With everyone connected to the theater mostly dispersed, John Quincy had hoped the argument had ended but found himself quite mistaken.
Not content to let it be, the governor sought the public’s approval, and toward this end Attorney General Sullivan published an article as “A Friend to Peace,” to justify the executive authority. Writing in the Independent Chronicle, on December 13, Sullivan stubbornly maintained that even if the law was unconstitutional, there was ample provision for a remedy for “the violent measures which have been resorted to,” and that the open defiance to a law established by the legislature, and recognized several times as proper and expedient, could not be justifiable.45
Having lost patience with Hancock’s and Sullivan’s “whimsical passion against the theater,” John Quincy notified his father that he would probably see in the next two Centinels a couple of pieces signed “Menander.” “Perhaps an interest in the success of the writer may induce you to peruse the discussion.”46
As Menander, after the Athenian general and poet, John Quincy meant to do battle, as he would all his life, intensely and with supreme courage, for the causes he was committed to, in this case, for the very existence of the theater, an institution he was happily acquainted with from his earliest travels abroad. And though the New Exhibition Room’s Hamlet had exceeded his expectation, his line-a-day diary reveals his displeasure with several other productions—on October 8: “Miser, & a pantomime very ill performed, the best bad, the worst inexpressible.”47
His passion, however, was unstinting for the company’s right to exist. And so he argued:
The friends of the theater in Boston have publicly contravened an act of the legislature, which they do not consider as the law of the land; they have not eluded the regular and constitutional discussion of the point; they have not betrayed a consciousness of doing wrong, by shrouding themselves in secrecy; they have not fled from the vengeance of the government which they have provoked. . . .
The observation relative to the dangerous tendency of an open disregard to established laws is just, but in its application to the present subject, it begs the question in dispute, for no obedience is due to an unconstitutional act of the legislature.48
John Quincy’s notes on December 24: “Very angry answer to Menander.” But he had done admirably in the opinion of his family. His father thanked him for his history of “Tragedy, Comedy and Farce.” The translation of the French account of the revolution was well done. In fact, he scarcely knew “of a greater service that could be now rendered to the people of this country than a faithful and impartial account of French affairs would be.” As for his Aunt Elizabeth Shaw, she had a favor to ask of her sister Abigail: “Whenever you may chance to see the sensible Menander, please to tell him that since he is so great an advocate for the theater, there are many friends in Haverhill who would wish to see him act his part there . . . any character which he may think appropriate to assume will please . . . but in none can he please your sister more than in that of an affectionate nephew.”49
There were still more compliments for Menander. His mother thought his articles were written “in a masterly style.” On further thought, his father rejoiced that John Quincy had taken the unpopular side of the questions concerning the incorporation of the town as well as of dramatic entertainments. It would serve, in his judgment, to hold back his prospective political career for some time and “give you leisure for study and practice, in your profession.”50
But John Quincy differed somewhat on how best he might use his leisure, given his instinctive preference for current events over law; best, he wrote his father in February, to give him an account of the commercial catastrophe now taking place in Boston. The bubble of banking was breaking; the pernicious practice of mutual endorsements on each other’s notes had been carried, it appeared, to an extravagant length. Also, the alarming passions and rivalries of some of the most prominent citizens made him apprehensive for the fate of their country. But this was not a subject on which he could dwell with pleasure. He desired to remain unconnected with political topics, because his sentiments in general were as unpopular as his conduct regarding the town police or the theatrical question.
Not that he had a predilection for unpopularity as such, he explained, but he held it preferable to the popularity of the day, which was his country’s obsession with the French. Suspicious of their efforts to despoil their neutral stance, he had persisted in refusing to appear at what he called the “anarchical dinner,” the civic feast that a committee of Boston citizens had organized for Thursday, January 24, to celebrate “the successes of their French brethren in their glorious enterprise for the establishment of equal liberty.” Most emphatically, “We have Jacobins enough,” he told his father.51
Once again, his father could not but approve of his son’s “refusal to appear at the delirious dinner.” But while both feared the menace posed by the French—the new French republic’s minister to the United States, Edmond Charles Genet, was already on the high seas—their ways of coping differed considerably. John Adams thought “we cannot be too cautious in forming our opinions of French affairs, and we ought to be still more slow in discoursing on them.” Angrier by far, John Quincy pictured the beastly local supporters of the French republic with “teeth and claws,” the propriety of their acceptance a matter of deepest anxiety.52
Minister Genet arrived in Philadelphia on May 16, 1793, in good time to read John Quincy’s three essays published in the Chronicle between April 24 and May 11 under a pseudonym, this time of the young Roman warrior Marcellus, in ardent defense of American neutrality. John Quincy’s son, Charles Francis, would note that these essays “gave a new turn to the course of his life.” He would assume the name of Columbus to publish five more essays from November 30 to December 14 to denounce foreign influence on American affairs, and as Barneveldt he defended Columbus against the rage of Americanus, Attorney General James Sullivan, who was a champion of Genet’s.53
This time there was no secret about authorship of the papers. Or, in the words of Samuel Flagg Bemis, “It was the impact on the United States of the French Revolution . . . that gave to John Quincy Adams the first profitable topic for his scholarly pen.” And, at last, the recognition for which he had been destined since his birth.54